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“The best music to listen to in a great Gothic church is the polyphony which was written for it, and was calculated for its resonance: this was my approach in the War Requiem - I calculated it for a big, reverberant acoustic and that is where it sounds best.”

Despite the flaming torches of the plebeian plotters which, in the Prologue, etched chiaroscuro omens within the Palladian porticos of Michael Yeargan’s imposing and impressive set, this was a rather slow-burn revival of Elijah Moshinsky’s 1991 production of Simon Boccanegra.

Although this concert was ostensibly, and in some respects a little tenuously, linked to the centenary of the Armistice, it did create some challenging assumptions about the nature of war. It was certainly the case in Magnus Lindberg’s new work, Triumf att finnas till (‘Triumph to Exist ’) that he felt able to dislocate from the horror of the trenches and slaughter by using a text by the wartime poet Edith Södergran which gravitates towards a more sympathetic, even revisionist, expectation of this period.

‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.’ The words of George Orwell, expressed in a Tribune article, ‘The Sporting Spirit’, published in 1945.

The Barbican Centre’s For the Fallen commemorations continued with this varied and thought-provoking programme, The Last Letter, which interweaved vocal and instrumental music with poems and prose, and focused on relationships - between husband and wife, fellow soldiers, young men and their homelands - disrupted by war.

Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress is not, in many ways, a progressive opera; it doesn’t seek to radicalise, or even transform, opera and yet it is indisputably one of the great twentieth-century operas.

Precisely where and when Così fan tutte takes place should be a matter of sublime indifference - or at least of individual taste. It is ‘about’ many things, but eighteenth-century Naples - should that actually be the less exotic yet still ‘othered’ neāpolis of Wiener Neustadt? - is not among them.

‘Can engaging with contemporary social issues save the opera?’ asked M. Sophia Newman last week, on the website, News City, noting that many commentators believe that ‘public interest in stuffy, intimidating, expensive opera is inevitably dwindling’, and that ‘several recent opera productions suggest that interest in a new kind of urban, less formally-staged, socially-engaged opera is emerging and drawing in new audiences to the centuries-old art form’.

Johann Theile, Crato Bütner, Franz Tunder, Christian Ritter, Giovanni Felice Sances such names do not loom large in the annals of musical historiography. But, these and other little-known seventeenth-century composers took their place alongside Bach and Biber, Schütz and Monteverdi during L’Arpeggiata’s most recent exploration of musical cross-influences and connections.

Can Piotr Beczała sing the pants off Jonas Kaufmann ? Beczała is a major celebrity who could fill a big house, like Kaufmann does, and at Kaufmann prices. Instead, Beczała and Helmut Deutsch reached out to that truly dedicated core audience that has made the reputation of the Wigmore Hall : an audience which takes music seriously enough to stretch themselves with an eclectic evening of Polish and Italian song.

Sadly, and worryingly, there are plenty of modern-day political leaders - both dictators and the democratically elected - whose petulance, stubbornness and egoism threaten the safety of their own subjects as well as the stability and security of other nations.

Who needs another Tosca? Seasoned opera buffs can be blasé about repertoire mainstays. But the Nederlandse Reisopera’s production currently touring the Netherlands is worth seeing, whether it is your first or your hundred-and-first acquaintance with Puccini’s political drama. The staging is refreshing and pacey. Musically, it has the four crucial ingredients: three accomplished leads and a conductor who swashbuckles through the score in a blaze of color.

The burden of the past, and the duty to ensure its survival in the present and future, exercise a violent grip on the male protagonists in David Alden’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor for English National Opera, with dangerous and disturbing consequences.

The full title of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem per l’anniversario della morte di Manzoni 22 maggio 1874 attests to its origins, but it was the death of Giacomo Rossini on 13th November 1868 that was the initial impetus for Verdi’s desire to compose a Requiem Mass which would honour Rossini, one of the figureheads of Italian cultural magnificence, in a national ceremony which - following the example of Cherubini’s C minor Requiem and Berlioz’s Grande messe des morts - was to be as much a public and political occasion as a religious one.

The 67th Wexford Opera Festival kicked off with three mighty whacks of a drum and rooster’s raucous squawk, heralding the murderous machinations of the drug-dealing degenerate, Cim-Fen, in Franco Leoni’s one-act blood-and-guts verismo melodrama, L’oracolo alongside an announcement by the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan, of an award of €1 million in capital funding for the National Opera House to support necessary updating and refurbishment works over the next 3 years.

This relatively new one act opera (music by Laura Kaminsky, book by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed) has become the most often performed contemporary work in recent years for several reasons. First, it is a wholly engrossing character study as it traces the topical, personal, transgender journey of “Hannah.”

Second, it achieves a luminous and absorbing effect with absolute economy of means, requiring only two singers, a string quartet, suggested scenery, and simple costumes. It is an opera producer’s dream that is also a spectator’s wonder.

Hannah Before and Hannah After are compellingly sung and impersonated by baritone Kelly Markgraf and mezzo-soprano Blythe Gaissert. As Hannah evolves from being trapped in a male body to embracing the woman she is, the two perform seamlessly together, to coin a phrase, “as one.”

Mr. Markgraf (Before) has a beautifully rich and well-modulated vocal delivery. He can thunder out pain that rings off the back wall one minute, and then break your heart with hushed, intense phrases of melting beauty the next. He is somewhat slight in stature, but looms large in stage presence and a total emotional investment.

Ms. Gaissert (After) matches her co-star in complete conviction, breathtaking musicality, and vocal allure. She is afforded a complex, riveting final scena of rage and frustration and doubt and acceptance that highlighted every one of her substantial vocal gifts. Blythe has a beautiful sheen in her well-schooled instrument and deploys an even delivery throughout the wide-ranging writing.

Director Kyle Lang has choreographed stage movement that is fluid and restless when possible, and wondrously still and reflective when appropriate. His varied use of the simple floor plan of a few steps and adjoining platforms is notable for its profound simplicity. Moreover, as the music intertwines the two beings, Mr. Lang visually embodies this with carefully considered, dance-inspired interplay between the singing duo.

He is well served by filmmaker and videographer Kimberly Reed who has collaborated fruitfully with set designer Jonathan Gilmer to devise a handsome backdrop of hanging screens. Projected on these are images of Hannah’s life experiences that accomplish the feat of being informative without being distracting. Ingrid Helton’s honest costumes provide just the right look, especially in her choice to have the actors and onstage musicians barefoot. That simple touch conveyed a subtle feeling that somehow primal truths were being addressed.

Pride of place for the physical production must go to Christopher Rynne for his accomplished lighting design. Not only did Mr. Rynne make potent use of well-focused specials, but he (and the director) were also not afraid to incorporate an intriguing use of shadows. Since Hannah’s life developed in a series of shadowy denials, having the soloists occasionally be on the edge of the light, or in and out of it, was telling.

Conductor Bruce Stasyna wrought a demonstrative performance from his small band of mighty performers. The Hausmann String Quartet played superbly under Maestro Stasyna’s assured baton, and their ensemble with the singers was musically and dramatically flawless. The conductor and two of the players were even called upon to play cameo roles in the action, which they accomplished with aplomb.

Ms. Kaminsky, Mr. Campbell and Ms. Reed have crafted a beautiful, informed work that might have been pulled out of today’s headlines. While its framework is somewhat that of a themed song cycle, with brief pauses after set pieces, the entire artistic team admirably keeps the tension, interest, and emotional honesty urgently tumbling forward throughout the eighty-minute duration.

I can’t imagine a better case being made for As One than San Diego Opera‘s haunting, lovingly mounted production.